Labor rates in Vietnam are rising and workers are getting increasingly scarce, said Clarence Smith, CEO of Haverty Furniture Cos., which uses Asian factories to make its company-branded products.

And even though Asian suppliers continue to source much of the timber they use from the Appalachian region of the U.S., the manufacturing of wood furniture “is not coming back to the United States,” Smith said in an interview.

Bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. was one of the Trump administration’s stated goals in imposing tariffs on Chinese-made goods.

The Atlanta-based furniture retailer wrestled with supply chain disruptions last year as the manufacturers it buys from fled China and set up operations in Vietnam. Some suppliers stopped making Haverty’s top-selling merchandise, forcing it to find new sources in Vietnam on the fly and causing shortages of some items at its roughly 120 U.S. showrooms.

For now, most of the disruptions are behind them even if the first phase of the U.S.-China trade deal will keep the 25% tariffs on Chinese-made furniture in place, Smith said. Haverty still imports leather and upholstered pieces from China, although it no longer gets any wood furniture from the country.

The factory relocations aren’t going to end, he said: “They’re already building plants in Cambodia. It’s moving just like it’s always moved.”

Smith compared the shift from China to Vietnam and into other developing Asian countries to U.S. furniture industry’s shift to North Carolina from Michigan a century ago. The upholstered furniture industry has seen a recent resurgence in North Carolina, but Smith said it’s far cheaper for Asian factories to make wood furniture from logs harvested in the Carolinas than for companies to manufacture the same products in the U.S.

He was referring to the central bank’s latest directives for banks to change the method of interest and fee calculation that may result in lower revenues. The central bank also asked banks to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) restructure their debts.

Predee forecast that combined bank loans to SMEs this year is expected to reach Bt100 billion, providing ample liquidity to their operations. He said the new way of interest rate and fee calculation will not depress banks’ revenues.

A projection made before the BOT measure on fee calculation pointed to a drop of 5 to 17 per cent in fee incomes this year given banks have different fee structures. However, he said the new measure introduced a few days ago would not significantly change the estimation.

The interest rate reduction on default debts is expected to be steep, but it is not a big part of banks’ revenues and the impact is not significant, he said.

Chansak Fungfu, executive director and senior executive vice president of Bangkok Bank (BBL), said central bank’s measures to help debtors cut cost would also reduce banks’ revenues. Banks have to adjust by adopting new technology or introduce new business models to tap other sources of income in compensating for the losses.

As of September 30 last year, Siam Commercial bank’s fee revenue accounted for 21.20 per cent of its total revenue, Kasikornbank 27.33 per cent, BBL 20.3 per cent, Krungthai Bank 17.2 per cent and Krungsri Bank 16.07 per cent.

Ghosn stunned Japan last week by jumping bail and fleeing to Lebanon, evading trial on four charges of financial misconduct while running the Nissan auto company.

“These allegations are untrue, and I should never have been arrested in the first place,” he said. “I’m here to clear my name.”

Ghosn complained of a “systematic campaign by a handful of malevolent actors to destroy my reputation and impugn my character” because of his plans for a closer partnership between alliance partners Nissan and Renault, and of his detention under a “corrupt and hostile system that presumed my guilt from day one.”

After his arrest in November 2018, Ghosn says he was kept in a tiny cell in solitary confinement, with lights kept on during the day and night, and faced hours of interrogation without his lawyer being present, a system he called “anachronistic and inhumane” that “violates the most basic principles of humanity.”

Japan’s legal system rests on the right of prosecutors to detain people without charge and subject them to relentless interrogation without the presence of defense counsel until they confess or incriminate themselves, a system criticized as amounting to “hostage justice.”

Suspects must be indicted or charged after 23 days, but Ghosn was simply rearrested on slightly different charges to prolong his detention for more 100 days. He was then released on bail, only to be rearrested when he threatened to hold a news conference inside Japan.

The whole case, he said, was cooked up between Nissan, the Japanese government and prosecutors to prevent closer relations between the Japanese automotive giant and its French partner Renault.

“Some of our Japanese friends thought the only way to get rid of the influence of Renault over Nissan was to get rid of me, and unfortunately they were right,” he said. “The collusion between Nissan and prosecutors are everywhere, the only people who don’t see it, maybe, are the people in Japan.”

Ghosn named executives in Nissan he alleged were involved in the plot to bring him down, but said he would not name Japanese government officials involved out of respect to the Lebanese government and people. But he said he did not believe Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was involved.

Ghosn was charged with underreporting his income and diverting company funds for his own benefit. But Ghosn said the income had never been paid to him, and the final amount had not even been decided or fixed.

Despite his protestations of innocence, Nissan and the Japanese government are not his only accusers. Renault, initially supportive, said its investigation found evidence of unethical practices, removing him from office and canceling his pension.

In September, Ghosn paid the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission $1 million to settle fraud charges for failing to disclose $140 million to be paid to him in retirement. Under that deal, Nissan was also forced to pay $15 million to settle charges that the car company and Ghosn neither admitted nor denied.

Nevertheless, many legal experts share Ghosn’s serious concerns with Japan’s justice system, while many foreign business executives say it is unthinkable that powerful, well-connected Japanese businesspeople would have faced similar treatment by the country’s legal system.

Ghosn said his trial was being “constantly postponed,” adding that learned on Dec. 25 that a second trial of some of the charges would not start before 2021 at the earliest at the prosecutor’s request.

All the time, he said, he was not allowed to see his wife Carole, supposedly because they might conspire to tamper with evidence but actually as a pressure tactic, he said.

“They knew I love Carole, and she’s a pillar for me,” he said. “Because they know all of this they said, ‘OK, we’re going to put him on his knees – we’re gonna cut him from his wife.’ ”

Over time, it became very clear that he had no chance of a fair trial in Japan, he said, while he had “no horizon” to see his wife, forcing him to flee to Lebanon.

“I said: ‘What is left? What is left? I had to leave,” he said. “It’s not very difficult come to the conclusion that you’re going to die in Japan or you have to get out.”

Defense lawyers in Japan complain that prosecutors routinely delay or deny them access to evidence, or even destroy evidence, while leaking damning details to the press, but the country’s Justice Ministry says it sees no need to change the system.

Ghosn said he had been portrayed in Japan as a greedy, corrupt dictator, with sections of the media uncritically reporting information illegally leaked from the prosecutor’s office.

“Why Japan is paying me with evil for the good I think I have done to the country? I don’t understand this,” he said. “I know the people of Japan aren’t like this.”

The war of words has intensified this week in the run-up to Ghosn’s public appearance.

On Wednesday, Ghosn’s defense team accused Nissan of a “gross perversion of the truth” for claiming that it conducted a robust internal investigation into its former boss.

The Japanese carmaker issued a statement Tuesday saying it would continue to pursue legal action “to hold Ghosn accountable for the harm that his misconduct has caused” to the company, citing “incontrovertible evidence” of various acts including the misstatement of his compensation and “misappropriation of the company’s assets for his personal benefit.”

But Ghosn’s international defense team issued a scathing rebuttal on Wednesday.

“The facts demonstrate that investigation was never about finding the truth; it was initiated and carried out for the specific, predetermined purpose of taking down Carlos Ghosn to prevent him from further integrating Nissan and Renault, which threatened the independence of Nissan, one of Japan’s iconic, flagship companies,” the statement said.

Nissan’s investigation, it said, was run by executive Hari Nada, “whose own conduct was the subject of the investigation,” with the help of the company’s long-standing outside counsel, which had already given the company legal advice on the same issue. Nissan never sought to interview Ghosn nor shared with him or the public the evidence it purported to find, it said.

“These are not the hallmarks of a company committed to conducting fair and impartial investigation, rather evidence that Nissan’s investigation was fundamentally flawed, biased, and lacking in independence from its inception,” the legal team said.

The scandal has damaged Nissan’s image and left the car company grappling with plunging sales and profits. But it has also tarnished Ghosn’s reputation.,He has been fired by both Nissan and Renault has become a fugitive with an Interpol red notice against his name.

The documents contain all relevant information regarding the upcomingmultiband auction.

Narupon Rattanasamaharn, senior vice president, head of regulatory division and Lertratana Ratananukul, senior vice president, head of government relations of dtac, on behalf of dtac TriNet Co Ltd picked up the bid documents for the multiband auction of the 700 megahertz, 1800MHz, 2600MHz and 26 gigahertz spectrum licences.

Dtac will now conduct a feasibility study of the criteria and procedure for the licence and will submit it to both the investment and full board meetings to make a decision on the auction.

TrueMove H Universal Communication, the mobile-phone unit of True Corp, was the first company to have picked up such documents to bid in next month’s 5G spectrum auction. It picked up the documents on January 3, a day after the NBTC made the documents available.

The documents will be available until February 3 and bids must be submitted on February 4.